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[AbigailMoment]

Open Sorcery is a text-based game that follows the development of an elemental firewall. A creature of intertwined magic and code.

There are 90,000 words of text, five animated sequences, eighteen achievements to pursue, and eight possible endings.

It was recently Greenlit and I'm currently working on porting it to Steam.

It is currently out for iOS and Android. The desktop version of Open Sorcery will have even more content.

You'll be able to:

- Explore the Deep Web, a subconscious network of human dreams that births spirits.
- Visit the Aethernet, a celestial realm of planets and concepts.
- Learn ALL matters and motives!*
- Burn EVEN MORE things with fire!
- Access a main menu!

Schedule and updates to come.

[AbigailMoment]

Okay. So I have a lot of things I want to get done in the coming months.

I thought I'd share my plans with all of you so that you know what to expect going forward.

----Active Projects----

Open Sorcery: Release on Steam
Status: Partially Complete
Release Date: Late December
(This may be ambitious, but I'm gonna shoot for it.)

Open Sorcery 2: Sea++
Status: I have the concept.
Release Date: Hopefully maybe about a year from now.

Making Open Sorcery Games an LLC
Status: Started all the balls rolling.
Completion Date: Around November 18th, according to Legal Zoom

Programming for NBC Universal (My day job)
Status: Crazy
Less Crazy Date: November 9th

----October----

Finish attending Meaningful Play Convention.

Recover from two straight weekends of convention travel.

Work very hard at my day job because stuff always gets crazy near elections.

----November----

Continue to work very hard at my day job until November 9th.

Rest for a couple of days.

Get all my ducks in a row about becoming a company and trademarking things.

Start seriously working on the Steam port.

----December----

Month dedicated to Steam Port of Open Sorcery.

Hopefully released in time for Christmas.

Because that would be neat.

----After December----

Open Sorcery 2

Also I have an extremely ambitious idea for Vive.

We'll see.

[Luno]

Yo! I tried the in-browser version for half an hour or so; I love the very practical use of color in the font and background to communicate the UI and to tie concepts together, lots of nice little touches (like the "googling..." pattern) that really help communicate the tech flavor.

A bit of feedback: maybe consider looking for ways to reduce unnecessary clicks. There are a few screens for which you don't really have a choice but to proceed and there's no value to the story (e.g. seeing the results of a battle). I realize there's a possibility that you may be limited by your tools in this regard, but I also found myself missing some sort of persistent UI elements to give me immediate feedback about my current progress, e.g. I have to click on each of the areas to see the scan status, which makes keeping track of the areas I have completed slightly tedious.

Again though, very cool concept, interested to see what kinds of new features you have planned for the sequel.

[AbigailMoment]

Thank you for the feedback!

I agree with your assessment of unnecessary clicks--while I like limiting the amount of text on each page, it can get tiresome to click through on subsequent playthroughs. I'm considering including a fast-mode that fast forwards through read text and only stops at relevant choices. I don't know how much work that would be, but it's on my mind.

In regards to persistent UI: I don't think the user needs a constant HUD cue to tell them where they scanned, as that information is not relevant while you're working in a specific area. However, to solve this problem, I COULD but a little red icon next to each of the locations in the location hub that changes to green when you scan them. That way you'll know at a glance where has been scanned exactly when you need to know that. Do you think that would help?

[Luno]

Makes sense. Ya true, maybe scan status was a bad example, but there may be other information like power level that could be useful to know at all times? It may just end up being noisy though, just kinda riffing here

Yea, I think some kind of complete icon or even making the scanned locations un-clickable would solve it.

[AbigailMoment]

Awesome. I think that's a good design change. Thank you for prompting it.

[AbigailMoment]

----Tuesday Update: This Week On Open Sorcery----

I've yet to get into the meat of expanding the game. I've been busy with my day job and preparing for GaymerX.

I'm going to be running an ARG at GaymerX! Take a look at my current draft for the rabbit hole:
http://www.abigailcorfman.com/ARG/GaymerXARG.html

I'm also going to be giving a talk on how to make an engaging game using only text:
https://gxeast.sched.org/event/8jlX

I'm talking to a company called IndieNova to get the Steam Release of Open Sorcery translated into Chinese.

And I'm looking into getting someone to help me with PR, because it intimidates me.

And I was Supergirl for Halloween.

But mostly I've been busy at work.

[AbigailMoment]

----Tuesday Update: This Week On Open Sorcery----

I did a lot of internal work. No new content, but code and game-experience improvements.

Open Sorcery is so large it kind of breaks Twine--there are so many passages the online utility has trouble rendering them. I improved on this in 16W2KaV@McD by reloading single nodes for long, no-choice sequences, incrementing a variable. It makes the UI a lot easier to manage. I converted a lot of OS' sequences to this style.

I implemented a Speed Run mode--a mode that skips the majority of the text, jumping directly to significant decisions. This is intended to help people replay the game without having to click a lot. (It also makes my debugging easier.)

I'm currently wrestling with implementing a more elaborate save system. It's irritatingly hard, I think mostly because my brain isn't really recovered from my 14 hour days during the election.

To go with all of this technical stuff, I have a visual treat. The image that will be representing OS on Steam:

[_glitch]

"What kind of sorcery is this?"

Sorry, had to be said.

[AbigailMoment]

Absolutely did. 

[AbigailMoment]

Status update!

On the technical side, I finished up saving and fixed a few bugs. I'm actively working on an iOS issue that impacts saving.

On the (WAY more interesting) content side, I've planned out all the additions I want to make:

* An extra day with a new spirit to find.
* New options if you have specific combinations of motives/matters.
* You can find and attack the final boss early.
* Sarah and Janet can become friends.
* Toby and Pyreworm can become friends.
* You can summon Schrodinger's cat.
* You can have a riddle contest with Titania.

[AbigailMoment]

Took some time off for Thanksgiving so this week was less productive than usual.

Wrote part of the new day.

Ran through on speed mode, fixed a bunch of bugs it opened up.

Have ALMOST fixed the iOS saving problem. I think. I hope.

Got this swank background from the dude who made my logo.

Wallpaper

[Sustrato]

This is a very interesting project to me. Technomagic is one of my favorite genres. Your story reminds me of how I imagine the world when I play MtG (Izzet burn decks, obviously) or other fantasy games. I played the whole demo, and I'm really not a guy for text-based games. I love riddles, but I'm terrible at them (I did look up a couple answers - the "two locks" one isn't really fair, considering [hint alert!] caps and num!), so it's weird to play games with riddles, because I usually play games to be good at things.

I like your writing; it could be tightened up, but your imagery is strong and there's a lot of clever bits (TCP, etc).

I think you are being very ambitious with this, which I respect, but I wonder how you'll fare. The interface does not convince me that I'm a program. Why can I only investigate so few bits of my world instead of googling everything? Why can't I run a diagnostic on my status at any time? Etc. etc. It's difficult to achieve without a full parser, esp. on HTML. But I hope you'll pull it off. Thanks for sharing.

[AbigailMoment]

Izzet's great. I'm more a Dimir girl myself.

I'll tell you a secret--I'm terrible at riddles too. That's why I like to be the ones asking them.

Tell me why you think the two locks isn't fair? Caps and num are what they refer to.

Thank you for your input and suggestions about what would make it feel more like a program! I'll take that into account.

[AbigailMoment]

I recently had a talk with a person in game marketing who informed me that it is a TERRIBLE idea to release anything during December because that's when all the big people are releasing their stuff.

So I'm moving the release date of OS Steam to mid-January. Because apparently that's a deadzone where no one's doing much of anything.

Power Word Marketing.

In regards to the game itself: The save/load system I implemented makes debugging WAY easier. So does the fast mode.

The timer at the end is now OPTIONAL. Sort of. You can make it real time, or you can have it decrease whenever you click it. I did this because I got lots of complaints that people didn't have time to read my beautiful writing.

I'm working on the new day--I just finished what goes on in Decker's apartment. He's a grump.

[AbigailMoment]

Sorry I didn't posts a status last week--I had the flu!

It's mostly gone now.

Anyway! Translating Open Sorcery into Chinese is a go. Because of this I am rushing like crazy to get in all my text changes by tomorrow.

I'm ALMOST done with all the new writing! It's lots of fun getting more into the character relationships. All I have to finish now is a sequence with BEL/S, Toby, and Pyreworm.

The translation process is complicated by the fact that I've added a sequence that references to the Anishinaabe practice of singing to water to heal it, and I need to run that writing by people familiar with the culture to make sure I'm not being horribly offensive. So I may have a page or five that need re-translating some time in January. We'll see.

Once I have the text with the translators, I'm going to add some more visuals and sounds.

On the more-boring-but-still-exciting-in-its-own-way side of things, my business is setup so I've been able to go forward with signing up with Steam. I'm now waiting for them to verify my tax information.

Woo!

[AbigailMoment]

The text of Open Sorcery is done!

I have written all the new things and sent it away to be translated into Chinese.

Now on to making it all work. I broke like 32 billion things when I added the new day.

(works industriously)

In other news--I've been trying to get a proper Steam page up, but since my company is new the Steam tax verification is taking a while. I don't THINK it will delay things beyond my release date of mid-January, but I wanted to keep y'all appraised.

This is the first time I'm doing most of these things! Unanticipated delays abound.

[AbigailMoment]

So! The good news is the game is about a week away from being done. I'm error testing and polishing now.

All the rest of the news is mildly frustrating.

Slight complication: The translators can't parse my text from my code, so I needed to strip out all my code. This means I'll have to reinsert the Chinese translation line by line. I will look at this as an opportunity to find a proper javascript translation service in anticipation of maybe someday doing this again with other languages.

The IRS still hasn't seen fit to publish my tax information so that Steam can verify it. I may call them. Because of this I can't do any of the advertising I was hoping to do gearing up for the release since I have no Steam page to direct people to.

Because of these complications I'll probably need to hold off on the release another month, meaning it will be out in February. This frustrates me because I'm going to HAVE the game ready, but it's just the things around it that aren't lined up!

Ah well. Classic planning fallacy. I should have budgeted more time for things not going as expected.

I'll take that month and use it to add neat animations and more sound effects.

[AbigailMoment]

Open Sorcery has been error tested a bunch and made into a windows executable.

I'm waiting on beta testing because I want to distribute it to beta testers via Steam, since that will be as close to the final product as I can get. So beta testing will happen as soon as the Steam page is up.

A bunch of stuff will suddenly happen when that happens. I have so much prepared.

I also updated the website:

Open Sorcery Games

My favorite part is the icon for the vampire game.

[AbigailMoment]

Most of the beta testing results are in.

Most people seem pleased with the additions. There are functional issues that I'm fixing now.

Now that I've ironed out the Steam Page, I feel comfortable setting the release date for the Steam game.

I'm planning to put it out on February 22nd.

2/22

So all you have to remember is 2.